Looong Fanfiction

The vast majority of my fanfiction ideas have started as dreams. Picture this scenario…you binge watch or read something from a particular fandom, be it reruns on Netflix, the books themselves, comic book forms of said books or shows, or even just reading fanfiction. And then you start dreaming about how those stories could be. Sometimes the idea is fleeting but sometimes it’s so interesting that you have the dream more than once. At this point it’s a good idea for you to pick up a pen and a notebook and start writing down ideas.

Now, once I have an idea for a fanfiction, one of two things will happen. The first is far less likely but far more preferable. And that’s that the idea is a long thought out one but I already know the start, the middle, and the end and I just have to fill in the blanks with dialogue and connecting scenes. But sometimes it’s not that easy. And that’s where I’ve been stuck on my fanfiction for the last few months.

Just like when I used to write fiction pieces for short story assignments in school, sometimes I have a brilliant idea and I know where I want to start and some of the middle pieces but I have no idea how I want to finish it. When working on novels that can sometimes be a good thing. Did you write two hundred pages but only need one fifty? Well that’s great because you’ll likely need to edit that many pages out, or more, out anyways!

But with fanfiction writing too much can be an issue. I like lengthy fanfiction to a point. I just don’t want the fanfiction to be the same length as the novel it was based on. That seems weird and a little like I’m insulting the work itself? I don’t really know how to explain it. So I try to rein myself in. Sometimes it just doesn’t work.